This is my version of the pelican riding a bicycle test. Every so often I ask the current best LLM to write G-code directly for my CNC plasma cutter, with no CAD or CAM in between, and then I cut whatever it gives me in steel.
Three runs so far: GPT-4 in April 2023, Claude Opus 4.5 in January 2026, and Opus 5.5 in September 2026. The first is a loose interpretation of “GPT”. For the latest I gave it only the URL of this page, and it looked up my machine’s specs and wrote Python to generate and debug the toolpaths.
This is my version of the pelican riding a bicycle test. Every so often I ask the current best LLM to write G-code directly for my CNC plasma cutter, with no CAD or CAM in between, and then I cut whatever it gives me in steel.
Three runs so far: GPT-4 in April 2023, Claude Opus 4.5 in January 2026, and Opus 5.5 in September 2026. The first is a loose interpretation of “GPT”. For the latest I gave it only the URL of this page, and it looked up my machine’s specs and wrote Python to generate and debug the toolpaths.
Photos of all three cuts are on the page.